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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 13th, 2024

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  • Puncturing the skin has nothing to do with it. Human skin normally has high resistance, the palms and fingertips more so due to their skin being thicker and more likely to be calloused. Saline will always lower that resistance, though possibly not enough to allow for painful shocks across the width of your body from fingertip to fingertip. That’s quite a lot of resistance to overcome. There’s also the matter of the resistance provided by the terminals, but we’ll handwave that.

    How often would you try to shock someone’s palms in a torture situation? How often do you expect to see current routed from the left hand all the way over to the right hand? And how likely are you to use just the lead battery terminals? Generally, you’d administer the shock across a shorter span, minimizing the most resistive part of the circuit. Any area with thinner, more sensitive skin is likely to experience thermal discomfort from a high amperage current, especially with lowered resistance. Even at 12V, it wouldn’t exactly be pleasant. The resistance is lowered even further by using thick copper cables, which are much more conductive than the lead terminals.

    The picana makes it all so much worse. Ohm’s law tells us that current is equal to voltage divided by resistance. The rheostat in the picana allows the resistance in the circuit to be manipulated further at the turn of a dial. Cranking down the resistance means more current is applied, and that current is flowing through two copper conductors that are typically pretty close together. That means you have even less skin to serve as an insulator against the current, which ultimately results in more pain for the unlucky person being tortured.








  • Point of fact, I’m not bobs_monkey, the originator of the rhetorical tone. Fax in healthcare continues to survive well past its prime because there is an inherent loophole: analog data transfer is functionally unsuited to encryption. This allows fax to be operated at a “best effort” level of security. There are handling protocols that are meant to keep traditional fax transmissions as private as possible, but these are layer 8 processes with limited enforceability. Beyond that, traditional fax represents a pathway around requirements on encryption while still meeting HIPAA compliance standards.

    FOIP is an improvement, but it still allows for interoperability with a traditional fax machine connected to a POTS line in some GP’s office that they’re unwilling to part with. That means the FOIP user can only be confident of the transmission being secure on their side. I can’t speak to the overall adaptation of FOIP in hospital systems, but I do know that there are non-isolated instances of hospitals still relying on traditional fax as opposed to adopting a cloud-fax solution. Hell, there are still major hospitals using SL-100s as their primary phone switches.

    I don’t even want to get into codec mismatches, because that falls out of scope when it comes to a privacy discussion.

    Long story short, achieving HIPAA compliance is a low bar with regards to fax, and if that were to change I believe we’d see fax disappear (finally!) shortly thereafter.




  • Oh, I full-on agree, hence that final paragraph. I’m one of those idgaf-about-fads types, but I know plenty of folks who do care and who get hosed by the system as it currently exists. Fashion as a whole is pretty much a racket as far as I’m concerned. But what isn’t these days?

    The reason they won’t price fast fashion bs lower is because they don’t have to. Trendy things sell at inherently predatory price points, then they declare a new “what’s hot” before the sales drop off. Capitalism is a mfer, and folks are exploited at every rung of the fashion ladder.

    I guess that would change if enough people stopped buying in, but do either of us see that happening any time soon? I don’t, and as frustrating as it is, I think you don’t, either. So garments marketed primarily to women remain pocketless and flimsy, and those marketed primarily to my-tastes-don’t-change men continue to trend towards work-wearish looks that are at least marginally sturdier at roughly equivalent cost.

    Except for those goddamn fishing shirts. Who decided that was a thing? They’re terrible.




  • Apart from fashionistas, “standard” men’s style is far more static. Cuts, materials, colors, and patterns don’t deviate far from the baseline from year to year, so garments tend to be a bit sturdier and longer lasting.

    As an example, picture a guy in a Henley, cargo shorts, and work boots. What decade is he from? Okay, now put him in straight leg jeans and a flannel shirt. Was this picture taken yesterday? In the 90s? 2005? Who knows, guys have been wearing that for ages, and will be for ages to come.

    However, pre-pandemic I think high-waist flares were one of the main jeans trends for women. Five years later, it’s low-waist straight-leg, right? Or have they shifted back to skinny jeans? I think early-2010s was the last time capris were the statement look, but hell, I truly don’t know. The point is, women’s styles seem to change not only year-to-year but season-to-season. Today’s trend is tomorrow’s faux pas is next week’s retro is next month’s vintage… sure, I’m exaggerating, but women’s fashion does lend itself more to sweeping change.

    The criminal part is that woman-specific options are underconstructed and overpriced compared to men’s clothing. That, and the lack of pockets. Seriously, my heart goes out to anyone who wears clothing targeted to women. I’d be fucking lost without pockets.